The Collapse of the Secret Service

When Omar Gonzalez vaulted the White House fence, pushed past a Secret Service guard and carried a knife all the way to the ceremonial East Room on Sept. 19, he did more than threaten the life of the first family and some of the nation’s highest officials. He shattered the idea that the White House is a sacred civic space, protected by the world’s most impenetrable security force.

In this and other shocking incidents in recent years, the Secret Service has revealed itself to be as bungling and dysfunctional as many other once-revered Washington institutions. It not only failed in its most fundamental task of protecting the White House premises, but it has failed to properly investigate threats after they occurred, and has not been forthcoming with the public about those lapses. The agency initially said Mr. Gonzalez was subdued at the White House door, only admitting the truth about the extent of his intrusion after it was uncovered on Monday by Carol D. Leonnig of The Washington Post.

“I wish to God you protected the White House like you’re protecting your reputation here today,” Representative Stephen Lynch, a Democrat of Massachusetts, told the Secret Service director, Julia Pierson, at a hearing Tuesday morning.

Ms. Pierson was unimpressive in her testimony at the hearing on security breaches, delivering passive, pro forma answers and failing to persuade questioners of either party that she has either the strategy or the will to right an essential but troubled agency. “Our security plan was not properly executed” in the Gonzalez incident, she said, in the bland bureaucratic understatement of the year. She even used the cliché that it was “obvious that mistakes were made,” but never really explained how they could have been made, or precisely what actions she planned to take beyond the required investigation and policy review. Only when asked if she was outraged did she say she was.

There are good reasons for that outrage. Mr. Gonzalez should have been stopped the instant his feet landed on the White House lawn, as 16 other fence-jumpers were over the last five years. But a plainclothes surveillance team with that specific task did not notice him, The Post reported. The attack dog that was supposed to be released was not. The front door of the White House was left unlocked. An alarm box at the entrance was muted because it was annoying members of the usher’s staff who work nearby. And the agent who eventually tackled Mr. Gonzalez — after the intruder ran past the staircase leading to the Obamas’ living quarters — was off-duty and just happened to be walking past that spot as he was leaving work. (The first family was not in the building at the time.) That detail, revealed by The Post Tuesday afternoon, was not mentioned by Ms. Pierson at the hearing.

In 2011, there was an equally frightening incident, never fully revealed at the time. A man named Oscar Ortega-Hernandez parked his car about 700 yards from the White House and fired a semiautomatic weapon into the upstairs residence area. (One of the Obamas’ daughters was home.) Some Secret Service officers thought there might have been an attack, but their supervisor decided it was just backfire from a vehicle and ordered them to stand down. As The Post reported on Sunday, it took four days for the Secret Service to finally understand that there was an armed attack, and only after a housekeeper discovered broken glass and chipped cement. The public and Congress were never properly informed.

The president and first lady, Michelle Obama, were reportedly furious when they were told of the incident several days later, and so should the American people be now. As several lawmakers noted at the hearing, the damage could have been unimaginably bad if the attackers had been organized terrorists rather than deranged individuals. And considering that President Obama has received three times the number of threats as his predecessors, there should be greater security for this White House.

The budget and size of the Secret Service, though, has fallen in the last few years. In 2011, the agency had about 6,900 staff positions; it now has about 6,600. Its budget fell from $1.9 billion in 2012 to $1.8 billion in 2013, in part because of automatic cuts demanded by Congress, and it has gone up only slightly since then. Though money cannot be the only reason for these errors, people inside the agency say the cuts have led to staff burnout, low morale and unmonitored posts.

Mr. Obama will now have to decide whether Ms. Pierson is up to the job of protecting him and his family, as well as the nation’s reputation. But, at a minimum, he has to insist on an independent, top-to-bottom review of the Secret Service, not one conducted by officials trying to protect themselves or their agency.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A26 of the New York edition with the headline: The Collapse of the Secret Service. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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